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Night Moves

Posted by theorangetheme on 11 December 2025 in English.

So as I was mapping some rooftop solar, I noticed that some of the houses were all offset from the Bing image data by the same amount. I’m pretty sure there’s a way to resolve this without turning my GPS on and driving around a bunch, but where’s the fun in that? I also wanted to play around with Go Map!! and get comfortable with uploading traces in general, so I turned on Go Map!!’s GPS and drove around a bunch while listening to a podcast. Seeing the GPS data later on in JOSM was neat! It was also a reminder that GPS has a sampling frequency, and moving in a car, even at 25 miles per hour, spreads those samples out.

I’m guessing this is an imagery offset problem (I think that’s usually more likely to be incorrect), but I want to be sure so the solar panels are correct. I have to dig in some more. I know there are various ways to do it, but I’m entirely too sleepy to figure them out right now, which means it is officially a tomorrow thing. :)

Edit: I got a brief second wind. I learned that there is an imagery offset database, although neither of the two options available helped in this instance. I also noticed that both Bing and ESRI imagery comport, so the buildings are offset by the same amount compared to both images.

I checked the history of one of the buildings, and it was created in 2018 from Bing imagery. I then checked the buildings against ESRI Clarity, and they match much better. Now it’s officially a tomorrow thing. ;)

Location: Orange, Orange County, California, United States
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Discussion

Comment from watmildon on 11 December 2025 at 19:46

Good luck on sorting it out! We have some older building imports that suffer offsets and I’ve been tidying up bits as I move through the map.

Comment from theorangetheme on 11 December 2025 at 21:15

Thank you! I should’ve read more about offsets beforehand heh; it wasn’t an issue before since I was just adding nodes. Now that I’m editing existing geometry, I have to think through things more carefully and methodically. I’m learning a lot, though.

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